


The Ghost and the Genius

by firefright



Category: Batman - All Media Types, DCU (Comics)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Cute, Domestic Fluff, Gen, Ghosts, Handcuffs, M/M, Meet-Cute, Past Character Death
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-11-09
Updated: 2016-11-09
Packaged: 2018-08-29 10:03:48
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,838
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8485132
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/firefright/pseuds/firefright
Summary: As a paranormal investigator, Roy really should have caught onto the fact there was a ghost living in his home sooner. But since this particular spirit seems more interested in cleaning up the house than haunting it, he thinks he can be forgiven.





	

**Author's Note:**

> Hi! Here's the second piece I did for JayRoy week. This one is Day 7: ghosts/domesticity/handcuffs, with the options to pick one prompt or do various combinations of the three. You can all thank Skalidra for talking out this idea with me so that it incorporates everything XD 
> 
> Warnings for extremely bullshit science and almost pure fluff. Really, so much fluff.
> 
> Enjoy!

He should have picked up on it sooner, all things considered. But the signs started small. Just an object out of place there, a door or window closed here where it was open before. The television flickering late at night in the middle of his favourite show.

Nothing big. Nothing that couldn’t be written off as the work of an absent mind focused on a bigger picture, even for someone like him.

Roy Harper is a professional ghost hunter, as laughable as it sounds. And indeed, most people did laugh at him when he told them that, at least until there was a poltergeist screaming and shaking the walls of their house. Then suddenly they couldn’t get enough of him or his crazy inventions.

But unfortunately for him, those kinds of opportunities are few and far between. Most of the investigations Roy embarks on are independently funded, rather than paid for by third parties, but he still manages to get by. A few patents for more commercially viable technological advancements have left him living the easy life, with more than enough extra cash to finance his true passion in parapsychology so long as he makes sure to live frugally otherwise.

He’s not a psychic, not a mystic. Nothing like that. Roy uses the power of his mind in another way, with science and invention to see the lingering dead. To speak to them. And despite the scepticism of others, he has, many times

He just never expected to find one in his own home.

It starts after he visits Gotham City. A place so full of ghost stories that it could be said to have its own ghastly metropolis for the dead beneath the streets where the living walked. Some of the locals pointed him in the direction of Crime Alley, a centerpoint for the city’s rampant crime rate, and the site of more than a few grisly murders.

Reports of paranormal activity were high, particularly in the alleyway where the Wayne murders had happened over thirty years before. But when he got there Roy was disappointed. Despite spending the entire night patrolling the area, and exploring the nearby abandoned apartment building from top to bottom, he didn’t see so much as a flickering light or floating orb to prove the rumours true. He did however, get some unusual readings on his ghost scanner in one particular room, and loath to go home empty handed packed up a few of the objects within for further examination in his workshop back home.

Except that one particularly violent haunting in a Gotham churchyard later - and after a rather uncomfortable flight home with a snippy flight attendant who spilled his drink all over his lap - Roy had forgotten all about them. The objects stayed buried at the bottom of the suitcase he never bothered to unpack properly, while his mind moved on to other, bigger projects.

That’s when things got weird.

Again, doors that should be open. Windows that should be closed. His keys moved from he’d left them on the kitchen counter to hang on the purpose-built hook by the front door. Empty beer bottles and takeout boxes chucked in the trash rather than left sitting out on his coffee table from where he’d collapsed on the couch after pulling an all nighter. The sheets on his bed tucked neatly in at the edges when he was sure he’d left them in a tangled mess.

Roy made excuses at first, the way people usually did when things they couldn’t explain happened around them. He’d been tired the night before, or had a little too much to drink while drawing up a new blueprint. That sort of nonsense, until finally he came home from a shopping trip to find a change far too big to explain through idle forgetfulness.

His workbench was spotless.

That, Roy knew, he could never be responsible for. No matter how drunk he was. 

It was a big enough revelation that he finally started connecting the dots, watching rather than passively observing. He made notes on his phone, acted casual, purposefully left messes just to see what would happen when he did.

Roy had never heard of ghost whose idea of a proper haunting technique was to clean someone’s house before. It was endearing to say the least, and as the days went on he actually caught himself thinking fondly of his uninvited guest more than once.

(Except when they moved his tools to where he couldn’t find them. Then Roy cursed them out under his breath until he finally figured out the ghost’s organisational system.)

Now, a week after his epiphany, Roy is finally ready to meet this mysterious spook.

The goggles he’s wearing are designed to pick up on ghost signatures in the air that are otherwise invisible to the naked eye. An older invention, he’s never had cause to wear them in his own home before, but he’s used them many times in other haunted spots around Star City and they’ve always done the trick there. 

The other piece of equipment he needs today - the one he’s _really_ excited about as his greatest work of genius yet - is hidden in the large front pocket of his jacket.

Roy is quiet as he sneaks down the basement steps into his workshop, not whistling or humming like he usually does. He purposefully made sure to leave an extra amount of mess down here last night to draw the ghost out this morning, then set his alarm to wake him up a couple hours earlier than usual. If he’s timed this right then it should mean…

He peers round the corner, and his eyes widen as he watches a screwdriver seemingly roll itself into an open drawer in his workbench. Then the drawer closes, and holey moley, is that ever some powerful manifestation.

Most ghosts struggle to rattle windows, but this one can actively lift and move objects with precision. Of course, Roy had understood the spirit must be strong based on the occurrences of the past few weeks, but seeing it in action right in front of him still takes his breath away.

Roy activates the goggles.

They don’t give him a crystal clear picture, but the dark shape he makes out against the eerie green light the lenses give the room is quite clearly male, and somewhat bigger than Roy himself is. There’s no sound to accompany his movements, but his body language reads irritation, as he reaches up to run a distorted hand back through his hair before shaking his head over the mess Roy left behind him.

Roy can’t stop grinning. He’s beyond excited. His very own house ghost is standing here right in front of him; how awesome is that?

He keeps creeping. Slow and steady until he’s standing behind the very preoccupied spirit, who stands safe in the knowledge that he can’t be seen or heard by living ears - or at least that’s what he thinks. Roy slips his hand into his pocket, and very slowly withdraws the handcuffs.

Ghosts are fundamentally unstable. That’s a fact. Otherwise their existence wouldn’t be dismissed as fantasy by most of the scientific community, and people like Roy wouldn’t be called crackpots for doing what they do. There needs to be an extraordinary amount of willpower behind any tangible apparition, and that’s something only the most powerful of the lingering dead are capable of (usually those who are particularly angry or bereft, hence the existence of poltergeists). Otherwise they’re like water, flowing around objects rather than pushing against them. What Roy’s designed these handcuffs to do is fix that by helping a ghost hold their ectoplasmic signature together, and hopefully - if they work the way they’re supposed to - give them an actual physical form.

Very, _very_ , carefully, Roy unlatches one cuff and reaches towards the wavering outline of the ghost’s arm. Possibly pretending that he’s a detective in a cop show all the while. He has to do this precisely, or else things could go tits up very fast.

He really doesn’t want to find out what a ghost this powerful is capable of when he’s angry, rather than just playing Secret Agent Maid in Roy’s house.

Then, when he’s only ten centimetres away, he just decides _fuck it_ , and lunges forwards, snapping the cuff closed around the ghost’s wrist before snapping its twin shut around his own to make sure the spirit can’t flee once they’re activated.

The effect is immediate, and Roy lets out a triumphant laugh as he pulls the glasses off his face to get a better look at the results of his genius.

The ghost on the other hand, _swears_ as he panics, trying to leap forwards away from Roy, through the workbench and into the wall beyond, only to find himself bumping into the heavy wooden frame instead of phasing past it _._ “Fuck!”

Tall was right, Roy thinks, as he’s dragged a step forwards, then hauled after the ghost across the basement when he starts to panic. Tall, dark, and surprisingly handsome, all things considered.

And again, panicking. 

“Fuck, fuck, fuck!”

“Hey, hey, take it easy!” Roy tries to say, lifting up his free hand in a soothing wave to try and calm the ghost down so his other arm doesn’t get yanked free of its socket. “It’s okay! You’re fine!”

“What did you _do_ to me?!” The ghost demands in a distinct Gotham accent, his eyes - a very pretty shade of blue bordering on green - dart from left to right before settling first on Roy, then their joined hands. “Oh my God!”

“I stabilised your molecules!” Roy informs him cheerfully. Then when the ghost stares at him blankly, says, “Uh, I made you solid?”

“How the fuck.” The ghost whispers, now lifting both his hands up in front of him to stare at them. It’s not perfect, and Roy can still see through some parts of him, but boy is it ever an improvement on both invisibility and intangibility. He’s more than impressed with himself this time. “How…”

“I could tell you. But I’d have to use a lot of big and complicated science words and usually when I do that people look at me cross-eyed. Or they fall asleep. One of the two. The short answer is that I’m a genius.” He sticks his free hand out in front of him, “Roy Harper, though I’m sure you already knew that. Pleased to meet you.”

The ghost doesn’t shake his hand. 

“This is the part where you say your name.” Roy says helpfully.

He’s probably still in shock, which accounts for the delay, but eventually the ghost responds, “I… uh… Jason. My name’s Jason.”

“Jason Todd?” Roy says, jumping back to that night he spent in Gotham. “You’re the guy who was murdered on the fifth floor of that apartment building.”

At that the ghost flinches, his expression burning hot and angry. He shrinks in on himself a little, “Fuck you.”

“Sorry.” Roy hastens to apologise, realising how insensitive that sounded too late. “Sometimes my mouth runs away without my brain’s permission.”

Jason shrugs, mouth still pinched angrily at the corners. “Not just sometimes.”

“Ouch. You really have been spying on me, huh?”

“Not my choice. You brought me here.” Jason keeps touching the cuff around his wrist, and then his own arm, clearly fascinated with his new physicality. If Roy remembers his research right, Jason died ten years before. That’s a long time in which to forget what it feels like to truly touch something.

Roy nods. “I figured, since you only started moving my stuff after I got back from that trip. Complete accident by the way.”

“Really.”

“Really, really. I’m not even sure which object it is your soul’s attached to. You don’t have to tell me either if you don’t want to. But if I do know it’d make it easier for me to keep it safe for you.”

Jason stares again. “Wait... you’re not… what do you mean keep it safe? You’re not going to try and exorcise me?”

“Dude, of course not!” Roy exclaims, shocked by the assumption. The thought had never even crossed his mind. “You haven’t been trying to hurt me, and do you know how cool it is for someone like me to have a ghost in my own house? I mean, the things you could tell me! I’ve got so many questions for you. Though we are going to need to have a serious talk about you touching my stuff first if you’re staying.”

If he was a little less excited, Roy would think twice about laying all this stuff on Jason so fast, but as he mentioned before his mouth moves faster than his brain sometimes, and he’s riding high off the thrill of his own success right now. A bad combination for coherency all around.

“If I’m…” Jason bites his lip, then presses his free hand to his face, shaking his head. “This is crazy. You’re crazy! I… I’m handcuffed to a crazy man.”

“Only for a little while. These babies are just prototypes, so they can’t carry much juice yet, but give me some more time and I’ll be able to fix that.”

“Crazy.” Jason repeats, he takes a step back, and almost jumps a mile when he bumps into the wall again rather than passing through it. Roy watches him touch the surface more cautiously with his hand this time, pushing firmly against the wall as if to prove it’s real. “Holy fuck.”

“I know, amazing right? So, about you touching my stuff.”

Jason looks back at Roy, glaring fiercely. He still looks off-balance, but not badly enough that he fails to get out a retort, “Your place is a mess. I refuse to live in a pigsty.”

“Fair point.” Roy says calmly. “But I’m not talking about upstairs. I’m talking about down here. My workshop is a sacred space, Jaybird, I need it to be able to pull off my genius inventions.”

“You’re going to break your neck, is what you’re going to do. Then there’ll be two ghosts haunting this house, and I’m not sure I want to spend the rest of eternity with an idiot like you, thank you very much.” Jason folds his arms. Or at least he attempts to, forgetting that one hand is now attached to Roy. One unthinking tug later and they’re practically in each other’s arms.

“Whoa…” Roy says, thoroughly distracted now. “You’re… wow, you’re kind of cold.”

Jason swallows. Somehow he’s blushing, and Roy can’t help wondering how that works, considering that he doesn’t have any blood to blush with. “You’re… uh, not.”

“Nope. Strictly speaking, cold is bad for the living.”

“I haven’t…” Jason’s face is very close to his. He looks upset, face made up in a tangle of misery and longing. “I haven’t felt warm in… not since before -”

With spectacularly bad timing, the power in the cuffs shorts out before he can finish, and Roy falls forwards through the space where Jason was, smacking his face straight into the wall.

_Crap._

“Sorry!” He yells through the ringing pain in his forehead. “Sorry, I’ll fix that! _Fuck._ ”

To add insult to injury, a wadded up piece of notepaper flies off the top of his workbench and hits him solidly in the back of the head.

*

After that, Roy starts talking to Jason all the time, even when he’s not corporeal.

He talks to him when he wakes up in the morning, and when he goes to bed at night. He talks to him over breakfast, and when he’s tinkering in his workshop, trying to make the power source on the cuffs last longer and figure out what caused them to short out in the first place.

He talks and soon enough, Jason starts to talk back. Hesitantly at first, but then growing in confidence when he realises that Roy was telling the truth and has no intentions of exorcising him out of his home or destroying his soul object.

Of course, _talk_ might be a strong word. When not physically present Jason has no voice to speak with, but he quickly proves efficient at making his opinions over what Roy is saying or doing known in other ways. Yes or no questions are the best ones to ask; the single or double tap method is easy to understand between them. 

He learns that Jason’s soul is bound to this plane by a framed photo of a woman: his mother. He learns that he’d remained in the apartment he died in ever since to see through the conviction of his murderer, and was determined that what happened to him would not happen to anyone else so long as he could stop it. He’d haunted the surrounding area out of a desire to protect the good people living there, scaring off the drug dealers and the muggers who would do them harm.

With that knowledge, Roy thinks Jason would want to return there, but when he asks him afterwards if he would like to go back to Gotham silence is his only reply.

(Later, when they’re more settled with one another, Roy will come to wonder if loneliness was behind that choice. But in the moment he’s only confused.)

Other messages are much clearer. 

When he leaves unwashed plates in the sink, Jason will throw a washcloth at him or set the tap running until he cleans them. Similarly, if he leaves his dirty clothes on the bathroom floor when taking a shower, the hot water will suddenly run ice cold, and if he’s watching something Jason doesn’t approve of on the television, a battle will begin for the remote: one he often finds himself on the losing side of, and Roy swears that Jason’s smugness over those victories is the most visible part of him without using any of his inventions.

It’s not all arguments however. There is another, softer, side to Jason that he comes to appreciate.

Those days when Roy falls asleep on the sofa, he now wakes to find himself covered with a blanket. When he works too late into the night, Jason will poke and prod him towards bed so that he doesn’t fall asleep over his workbench either, saving him a sore neck in the morning. Then, as time goes on and they grow more comfortable with each other still, he comes downstairs in the morning to find the coffee machine already working, sometimes with slices of bread already in the toaster if Jason is feeling particularly generous towards him.

The more weeks pass, the more Roy feels like he has an actual roommate living with him, rather than a spectre. A friend more than a spook.

Jason never mocks him for his peculiarities, or tells him he’s wasting his time and money in pursuit of understanding how and why ghosts exist at all (which of course would be hypocritical of him as a ghost himself, but Roy gets the impression that Jason’s not the kind of person who would have done it when he was living either). Instead he listens and responds when he can, teaching Roy what little he has come to understand of the afterlife in the time since.

It’s interesting to hear about the way the dead perceive the world in contrast to the living. The things they see, the horrors they feel. Jason tells him about the bloody marks violent deaths leave on the world, and the glimpses of other deadlier creatures he’s seen from time to time. Shadow monsters and men with burning eyes.

As it turns out, there are other beings out there that even the dead fear.

Finally, there comes a day when Roy thinks he’s finally stabilised the power source in the Ghost Solidifier, as he unofficially names it, and calls Jason to his workshop to test the device. A little more tinkering here and there has turned the device from a pair of handcuffs to a single chunky bracelet, which will be far easier on Jason to wear and move with.

He wears the goggles once again to place the bracelet around Jason’s arm, then hits the switch. It takes a second, but then there Jason is, standing real and whole in front of him. Still tall, dark, and very good looking.

“How’s it feel this time?” Roy asks as he tugs the goggles off and places them down on his workbench. “Any discomfort?”

Jason shakes his head, staring at the bracelet on his arm in wonder. He’s manifested wearing a green shirt and dark jeans today; clothing at least seems to be something the dead have a choice in. “No. It feels fine. Feels good.”

“Looks good.” Roy replies, only half talking about the quiet hum of the bracelet’s circuit. “It should last about three hours this time, rather than five minutes.”

Under his watch, Jason reaches out to touch the workbench, trailing his fingers across the grooves in the wood. There’s a smile on his face as he feels the grain against his fingers that makes Roy feel prouder than he ever has of his genius before. “This is amazing. I… wow. I can’t believe you pulled this off.”

“Gee, thanks.”

Jason flushes, which is still curious to see considering that he’s, well, _dead_. “I didn’t mean it like that.”

“I know,” Roy grins, “I’m just messing with you. But seriously, you like it?”

“Roy,” Jason says, shaking his head in wonder. “You… I can touch things again. Really _touch_ them. I can feel the air, I can…” he stops talking, then walks forward. Seemingly even the act of walking with a physical body is something joyous, because he’s grinning when he takes Roy’s hand in his. “ _Thank you_.”

Now it’s Roy’s turn to be flustered. He reaches up with his free hand, scratching the back of his head and dislodging the bun he stuffed his hair into this morning. “It’s nothing. It’s er…” the chill of Jason’s fingers in his is thoroughly distracting. “It’s been good having you around. You’re a cool guy, even if you steal the remote sometimes.”

Jason laughs, and Roy probably shouldn’t find it as much of a thrill as he does. “Moron.” then he looks down. “It’s been nice living here. Thanks for not kicking me out.”

“No problem.” Roy nods, barely paying attention to anything other than the fact they’re still holding hands. “So um, as a solid person for the next three hours, what do you want to do first?”

Jason steps closer, his smile wide and open, carried by happiness. Both his hands now hold Roy’s, and up this close he can see all the varying shades of blue and green in Jason’s eyes.

“I can think of a few things.”

Later, Roy is more than pleased to report that cold kisses can be just as pleasant as warm ones, and that death absolutely doesn’t have to be an obstacle in maintaining a happy and healthy relationship.

**Author's Note:**

> [tumblr!](http://firefrightfic.tumblr.com/)


End file.
